FirstCuts: Could EA Devour Take Two Sports Titles?

By Chris Littmann
Sports don’t start and end with a referee’s whistle. FirstCuts, a blog dedicated to sports culture, will cover everything outside the lines, from games to gear.
Yes, you’re aware that the EA Sports has an exclusive license to make NFL games. And if you’re an attentive TSB reader, you also know it could be the same with college hoops in the near future.
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Then there was all of this business over the weekend: EA made an unsolicited offer to purchase Take Two Interactive. Let’s get to the part of this story that matters before delving into semantics that might never come into play. Take Two’s quick answer: No thanks.
There’s a lot of “reading” involved in this next part, but there’s the whole matter of letters traded between EA and Take Two on the Take Two investor relations site as well as a fully launched site by EA dedicated to their attempted acquisition.
I couldn’t help but feel like I was watching the gaming industry’s version of Microsoft trying to buy Yahoo! Maybe it’s a bad comparison, because based on my conversation with a co-worker today, I know about as much about business as I do hang-gliding.
So what does it all mean for you, the sports-game addicted shut-in?
A quick skimming of today’s conference call didn’t provide any answers about the future of sports titles. You’d love to think that -- at the very least -- they’d start incorporating some of the good ideas from 2K Sports with some of the good ideas from EA titles to create something great. It would also seem we’d be in the land exclusive licenses for almost every sport. (Kotaku brings up the point that 2K Sports would be no more, depriving us of great games like Top Spin Tennis, which will be releasing for the Wii, as a quick aside.)
On the heels of a $26 per share offer, Take Two’s stock jumped roughly 50 percent today. I’m just glad to see EA is learning from its mistakes. Maybe we should just embrace our EA overlords and prepare to go to work in the Madden fields.
Hat tip to Kotaku, who has been all over this during the weekend.
> EA’s Proposal Rejected | Take Two
> An Open Letter From John Riccitiello | EATake2.com
> EA Conference Call (PDF) | EATake2.com↵